Comment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
Sidney M. Wolfe, a doctor turned consumer activist who fought drug companies, lobbyists and regulators during a nearly five-decade campaign against ineffective, risky and overpriced drugs that made him a hero of patient advocacy groups and an implacable enemy of all opponents, died Jan. 1 at his home in Washington. He was 86.
The cause was a brain tumor, said his wife Suzanne Goldberg.
Dr. Wolfe did not practice medicine for long and instead spent most of his career at the Health Research Group, part of the Washington-based Public Citizen organization founded by consumer activist Ralph Nader.
To uncover drugs and medical devices that he was convinced could kill or harm patients, he searched for clues in thousands of research papers and medical journals and stacked them in flammable piles around his office. Scientists at regulatory agencies, particularly the Food and Drug Administration, shared information with him, usually under the guise of anonymity. (One source called himself Dr. Doonesbury, after the comic that skewered politicians.)
Dr. Wolfe is “almost unique in the world of drugs,” Michael Jacobson, then executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told The New York Times in 2005. “He spends his life systematically looking for problems and he finds a remarkable number.”
His petitions and lawsuits helped remove more than two dozen dangerous or ineffective drugs from the market.
The banned drugs include the diabetes drug phenformin, which has been linked to hundreds of deaths; the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx, which caused severe heart damage; and the anti-diarrhea remedy Lotronex. He also successfully petitioned federal regulators to place a warning on aspirin bottles about Reye's syndrome, a potentially fatal condition linked to children's use of the painkiller for flu or chickenpox.
“Sid has the ability to put things on the FDA's agenda,” Robert Young, an FDA official and rare Wolfe admirer within the agency, told the Wall Street Journal in 1985. “When [Health Research Group] If you submit a petition, it will be examined very carefully.”
In a statement, Nader praised Dr. Wolfe for “focusing on trauma and disease prevention, accountability for drug companies’ gouging and unsafe practices, and effective regulation by the FDA.” [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration]. … Millions have benefited from this work.”
Among his critics, Dr. Wolfe earned a reputation as a regulatory chicken in his early campaigns against Alka-Seltzer, cough syrup, contact lenses, food additives, toothpaste and entire professions (dentistry, psychiatry).
An official from the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association, the drug industry's main lobbyist, told The Washington Post in 1978: “His problem is an excess of zeal. “He tends to exploit every negative aspect of drug therapy to frighten the consumer.” An FDA official once called him “adversarial, unfair and self-serving.”
These criticisms were declarations of bravery to Dr. Wolfe. He believes drug manufacturers, regulators and medical groups have been too friendly with each other, leading to the approval of unsafe and ineffective treatments. With his booming, trembling voice, he was impressive, especially when testifying before drug regulatory panels or in Congress.
“If someone contradicts what Sid believes to be scientific truth, he goes crazy,” Nader told the Times. “He doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”
FDA Commissioner Donald Kennedy told Time magazine in 1978: “Sometimes when I was upset with Sid, I realized that I was really upset with myself for not recognizing a problem as serious at first glance as I did.” it should have recognized. In the past there has been a tendency not to question the fruits of technology.”
If Dr. When Wolfe found crucial evidence in academic papers, he often bypassed bureaucrats and went directly to agency heads to effect change, pressuring reporters to cover it. Malcolm Gladwell, who endured many of his phone calls as the Post's business and science reporter in the 1980s, called him “the push for Washington.”
“My memories of Sid are that you never knew when you were going to hang up,” Gladwell said in a 2022 episode of his “Revisionist History” podcast, focusing on Dr. Wolfe's early and largely ignored concerns about opioid painkillers focused.
“He won’t just talk to you,” Michael Specter, another former Post science reporter from that era, recalled during the podcast. “Then the flow of information begins. That's when faxing started to take off, because that's how we got our things. I'd go out to lunch, and if there was a stack of fax paper on my desk, it would be like saying, 'Sid struck.'”
Sidney Manuel Wolfe was born in Cleveland on June 12, 1937, and grew up in what he once described as a “very liberal, progressive” household. His father was an industrial safety inspector for the Ministry of Labor and his mother taught English in public schools.
As a teenager he had the tendencies of a Renaissance man. While in school, he joined the Atomic Science Club and wrote letters to Albert Einstein. He also frequented jazz clubs. “I was 15,” he told the Post, “and I sat there for six hours listening to Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Chico Hamilton and Art Pepper, back when progressive jazz ruled.”
In 1959, Dr. Wolfe received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University. A summer job working with hydrofluoric acid that left him with first-degree burns convinced him not to pursue a career in chemistry. Instead, he attended medical school and graduated from Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1965. He completed training as a pediatrician and anti-war assistant Activist Benjamin M. Spock.
To avoid fighting in the Vietnam War, he joined the public health service, said Dr. Wolfe. He was active in the protest movements of the 1960s as a member of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, a left-wing antiwar group that also fought with the American Medical Association over gender issues in medical care.
After declining his membership in the AMA, Dr. Wolfe volunteered with groups that provided medical care to anti-war protesters and the poor. One evening he called a doctor friend from the National Institutes of Health to help care for a woman associated with the Black Panthers. “He said, 'Get out of bed,'” the doctor, Anthony S. Fauci, told the Journal. “It’s old Sid.”
In 1971, Dr. Wolfe was conducting blood tests at the NIH when a scientist friend from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called him with a complaint. federal regulators, The friend said we refuse to recall Abbott Laboratories' widely used but contaminated intravenous fluids.
Hundreds of patients became ill and some died. Abbott said a recall would result in patients missing essential fluids. In response, the government asked doctors to stop using the fluids at the first sign of infection.
Dr. turned angrily. Wolfe to Nader, who had recently founded Public Citizen. Nader suggested writing a stern letter to the FDA.
“It is malpractice to wait until a patient shows signs of a blood infection and then discontinue use of products known to have high frequencies of bacterial contaminants,” they wrote to FDA Commissioner Charles C. Edwards. “It is a cowardly rejection of the ethics of preventative medicine.”
Dr. Wolfe and Nader also sent the letter to reporters. A few days later, the FDA recalled millions of bottles of these liquids. Patients and government scientists began bombarding him with tips about other dangerous medical devices on the market.
“That led me to believe that there were a lot of problems that were well documented, but no one had done anything about them,” said Dr. Wolfe later told The Post. “It seemed more interesting to try these things than to do research.”
In 1971 he founded the Health Research Group with Nader.
In 1980, he self-published “The Worst Pills, the Best Pills: A Consumer's Guide to Avoiding Drug-Related Death or Illness.” It has sold millions of copies and is now distributed by a division of Simon & Schuster. A decade later, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a “genius” grant and $350,000.
“People like Sid can be really annoying sometimes,” Edwards, the former FDA commissioner, told the Post in 1989. “You have to take your hat off to someone who has dedicated his career to what he used it for.” . There are certainly jobs that are more fashionable, more lucrative and where you get much more respect.”
Fashionable and lucrative were indeed words rarely used in the same sentence about Dr. Wolfe, who for years never earned more than $50,000 a year and whose wardrobe contained wrinkled shirts and Harris tweed jackets.
Dr. Wolfe's first marriage to Ava Albert ended in divorce. In 1978 he married Goldberg, a clinical psychologist and artist.
In addition to his wife of Washington, survivors include four children from his first marriage: Hannah Wolfe and Rachel Wolfe, both of Manhattan, Leah Wolfe of College Park, Maryland, and Sarah Wolfe of Salt Lake City; two stepsons, Nadav Savio of Oakland, California, and Stefan Savio of Pittsfield, Massachusetts; a sister; and five grandchildren.
Friends and family members asked Dr. Wolfe often asks for health advice. Many of his colleagues attached great importance to vitamins. Not Dr. Wolfe.
“Apparently a lot of public interest people take vitamins,” he told The Post in 1978. “I tell them that these are chemicals, that they are made by big pharma, just like the stuff they are fighting. but they don’t listen.”